714, 60: Soccer needs its own American story

In a follow-up piece to our discussion on whether soccer to have more statistics to thrive in the States, Josh Crockett looks at the history of American sports culture and concludes it’s the stories behind the numbers that matter.

[America has] had, after all, a century of the most extraordinary and compelling sporting stories to savor and reflect upon. [And] America possesses a literary culture that has, like no other, risen to the challenge of expressing them — a dual heritage I found condensed in Red Smith’s homage to the “Shot Heard Round the World”…

Ask a baseball fan about the numbers 714 and 60. It’s unlikely that the respondent will simply state that they represent the third-most total home runs hit in a career, or just the eighth-most home runs hit in a single season. He or she will describe them as records, despite that they were surpassed thirty-five and nearly fifty years ago respectively. Credit that to the legend of the man who hit them. The numbers are important, but only as pointers to a story. What’s the response to 61? Ambivalence*. 755? Respect for not just skill, but perseverance. 70 and 68, followed soon after by 73 and 762? Perhaps not even recognizable outside the cities in which they were achieved, because many dislike the story behind them. If numbers were central to the value of the sport, that wouldn’t be the case.

Most writers use only baseball to argue that soccer needs statistics to graft itself onto American sporting culture, because baseball is easily the most numbers-heavy of American sports. ESPN The Magazine’s Chris Sprow gets credit for bringing American football and basketball into his argument by consulting Football Outsiders‘s Aaron Schatz and TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott.

The problem with the gridiron game in particular, though, is that Schatz’s mission is exactly that which Sprow suggests soccer undertake — and Schatz’s new statistics, while useful, still aren’t commonplace in American football discussion. For non-kicking plays from scrimmage, six players out of twenty-two on an American football field can accumulate meaningful individual first-order statistics. Most observers judge the other sixteen qualitatively and collectively. For example, does a cornerback accumulate no interceptions and few tackles because of a lack of skill? Or does the receiver lined up against him lack skill himself? Or is his skill such that opposing coaches refuse to throw the ball near him? Or does the opposing team just pass the ball very rarely in its offensive scheme? Postgame, media and coaches alike will usually grade out his team’s collective defense (or even specifically passing defense) and call individual plays and players out for discussion. The grading system may not be one-to-ten, but soccer fans can certainly recognize this mode of assessment.

In his seminal work Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, Andrei Markovits argues that American sporting preferences were set in the 1920s and 1930s as cultural markers. For the native-born population, baseball and American football were the two clear centerpieces — American-created games that quickly spread nationwide. Immigrant communities, though, pursued three different tracks. Baseball meant Americanization and assimilation. Basketball, particularly in its Northeastern home, offered some ethnic solidarity and identification, but within the context of a game invented in America — a context that offered an entry point to others as well. But soccer pointed explicitly and completely backwards, to the homeland and the past. The story soccer offered, as much as they enjoyed the game, was a story which, overall, that generation of immigrants wanted to leave behind and that their children did leave behind, and that native-born Americans couldn’t access at all. The terms in which the games were discussed — numbers or subjective assessments — didn’t matter. The story behind each sport did, and the story soccer offered was rejected as foreign by one group and eventually abandoned by the other.

In the 1990s, the wall began to crack. Markovits identifies hockey as the exception proving the rule of early American rejection of foreign sports, but that exception only held in a regional heartland that hugs the Canadian border and barely views that country as foreign (thus allowing hockey to “pass”). Once sporting preferences set, top-level hockey outside this area met little but failure until the 1990s — the NASL and hockey’s first Southern efforts in both the NHL and WHA followed a remarkably similar trajectory. Now in the second try, despite some setbacks, hockey has taken root in such varied settings as Dallas-Fort Worth and the Research Triangle of North Carolina. In Texas, hockey’s route toward acceptance has come alongside spectacular growth in youth participation. The Carolina Hurricanes promoted a unique, rowdy fan culture that sprang up once the team moved to its permanent home arena and exploded during the team’s first long playoff run in 2002. Both paths should seem awfully familiar to soccer fans.

Caniacs

In neither place did hockey change its mode of discussion (which is itself not statistically heavy) — what grew was the story behind it, whether that involved ten-year-olds in Dallas aspiring to be like Mike or North Carolinians smoking a whole pig in the parking lot before games. And in the end, that’s where the answer lies for soccer as a spectator sport in the U.S. — not in creating numbers and new evaluative structures that, in the end, only mimic the pointers to the lore of traditionally American sports. Soccer needs its own American story — and fan culture can be a central part.

Great article. What you say rings true in that the ascension of soccer (if there is to be one) will be a piecemeal regional one rather than an explosion on the national consciousness. Towns like Portland, Seattle, etc. make sense as expansion locations for that exact reason-it’s the longer standing clubs that have yet to create a unique culture that are worrisome (oddly enough the city that comes to mind is Dallas, where they’ve accepted hockey in a surprising way, but are still not supporting soccer in large numbers). How much of the responsibility falls to the organizations and how much you can put on an intrinsic resistance to the game is tough to determine.

The Offside book by Markovits was the most interesting read I’ve had in years.

Great post. Fans and supporters are the soul of any sports league, and I agree with most everything you’ve said. I’m pretty sure Markovits’s claim at the end, though, is that MLS must essentially “beat” the NHL to cement itself in our national consciousness and become the fourth main sport. The Dallas situation, where a city already has the Cowboys, Mavericks, and Stars, is an example of this. A vibrant hockey team might be crowding out the kinds of fans FC Dallas needs. Chicago’s recent ticket troubles have also directly coincided with the Blackhawks’ playoff run.

Seattle Sounders FC are in a way, filling the gap left by the Sonics, and the fact that there are only 3 Major League teams in Seattle now. I think this is the reason MLS is now expanding mostly to cities without huge Major league presence (Philly excluded).

While I agree that US Soccer needs an international face, which is the only way to get the American media to recognize its own, it’s going to take years of patience and a couple of lucky bounces of the ball in favor of the Yanks.

The MLS is slowly but surely developing, whether some want to disagree or not. The nation as a whole is hitting a peak in terms of footballing talent for the 2010 cup, and it will now depend on the nations ability to develop better players in general going into the future.

But as for this article, the only way the US gets its footballing face is for the US to make some kind of footballing history. MLS is an average league, and dominating CONCACAF isn’t good enough anymore.

To the yanks.

June 19, 2009 at 10:59 amchris L

In the 60s and 70s, I grew up watching the stories produced and broadcast by NFL Films. I fell in love with American Football partly through these stories.

Their formula was to describe a game from beginning to end, focusing on key plays, and giving brief stories, within the stories, of key the participants. Learning about the games was great but hearing the player stories was even better.

I heard stuff like ….he didn’t enter the NFL until 1958, but he was a seventh-round draft pick of the Browns in 1957… OR …he was a mill worker as a teenager from a tough part of town… OR …everyone hated him but everyone repsected him…

Similar personal soccer player stories do not exist in the minds of Americans. Someday, some entity will produce compelling, well told stories and plant them in the minds of americans. Soccer will elevate in importance then.

July 10, 2009 at 9:09 pmA. Ruiz

Chris, good point.

I honestly had no idea about the NY cosmos, even after I started following MLS. I knew about Pele, Best, Cruydd and Beckenbauer, I just had no idea about the NASL at all!

Well not until the documentary “Once in a Lifetime” came out.

Anyway, a few years back MLS had Edward James Olmos narrate a bunch of “NFL films” style MLS highlights. I think it’s a good proof of concept. I think a saturday morning/afternoon type show after cartoons on Fox Network would help. I used to watch “This Week in Baseball” growing up and it helped me get into the league. Well that and watching the Cubs on WGN.